Let me begin by disclosing something about myself. I do not like George Soros. I consider him a monster. I think he is evil. I think he is wicked. I think he has spent many millions of dollars funding projects and people that wish to harm my country.
George Soros is an old man. At age 95, he won’t live much longer. When he dies, I will say nothing in public in the way of celebrating his death. I will remain mute. I would be wrong to do otherwise.
Let me also remind my readers that back on September 25th, 2025, I published Issue #340 of Uncommon Sense. The article that appeared in this column documented more than two-dozen mostly public figures who mocked and celebrated the assassination of a fellow American (or, perhaps not a “fellow” American, but an American) named Charlie Kirk. I had thought Charlie Kirk’s mockers had gotten their sick urge to spew vile words out of their system
I was wrong.
There are moments when a society reveals something unsettling about itself—not through grand policy debates or ideological clashes, but through the small, ugly choices individuals make when they believe no one is watching. Or worse, when they believe everyone is watching and cheering them on.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10th last year was one of those moments that should have united people, at minimum, around a shared sense of human decency. A man was murdered in broad daylight because someone despised his beliefs. That alone should have been enough to give even his fiercest critics pause. It should have drawn a line—clear, bright, and immovable—between disagreement and dehumanization.
But that line did not hold.
Instead, what followed was something far more disturbing than political disagreement. It was celebration. It was mockery. It was the casual — nay, gleeful — stripping away of empathy for a fellow human being whose life had just been violently taken. The spectacle of it all was not just offensive — it was revealing. It showed how quickly moral restraint can erode when tribal loyalties are given permission to override basic humanity.
And yet, even that was not the end of it.
One might have hoped that time would dull the edge of that cruelty. That the initial shock, anger, and yes, even ugliness, would give way to reflection. That people would step back, reconsider, and perhaps feel some measure of shame.
That hope, it turns out, was misplaced.
A recent incident involving Erika Kirk — widow of a murdered man — demonstrates just how deep this problem runs.
A private employee at Alo, a clothing company, accessed and leaked Erika Kirk’s personal shopping data where approximately $1,000 was spent the day after the murder of her husband. (For the record, the moment Erika Kirk learned her husband had been shot, she made a bee-line for the airport with only the clothes on her back; she packed nothing.)
Let’s pause there for a moment. This was not whistleblowing. This was not exposing corruption or wrongdoing. This was the deliberate violation of someone’s privacy at one of the most vulnerable moments of her life.
And for what?
To fuel a narrative.
What narrative? The false narrative that Erika Kirk was in no way bothered by her husband’s savage murder, but instead she was gleefully out shopping because new clothes were more important to her than her husband’s death.
Does any normal person really believe that?
That stolen information was then handed off and broadcast to an audience primed to interpret it in the worst possible light. The implication was clear: that a grieving widow, less than a day removed from the violent loss of her husband, was somehow callous, indulgent, or insincere in her grief.
The reality, of course, is far more human—and far less convenient for those eager to judge. Faced with sudden tragedy, people act in ways that are often practical, disoriented, and immediate. She had left with nothing. She needed basic necessities. But nuance does not trend. Context does not go viral. Cruelty does.
What we are left with, then, is not just a breach of privacy, but a coordinated act of character assassination layered atop an already devastating personal loss.
This is where the phrase “abject cruelty” is not rhetorical flourish—it is precise. There is something fundamentally broken in the moral calculus of a person (a Tik-Tok creator named “@markosbits”) who sees a widow’s purchase history as ammunition. There is something deeply corrosive in a culture that rewards that behavior with attention, clicks, and applause.
And there should be consequences—not just legal, though those may very well come—but moral.
Shame is an unfashionable concept these days, often dismissed as judgmental or regressive. But properly understood, it serves a purpose. It marks the boundary between what is merely permissible and what is profoundly wrong. It reminds us that some actions, regardless of intent or ideology, fall beneath the standard of basic human decency.
This is one of those moments.
To the individual who accessed and leaked that private data: you were entrusted with information that was not yours to use, let alone weaponize. You violated that trust for reasons that cannot be justified by any appeal to principle.
To the individual who amplified it: you took that violation and turned it into a public spectacle. You chose to interpret the worst, to encourage others to do the same, and to aim that judgment at someone already enduring unimaginable loss.
This is not accountability. This is not activism. This is cruelty—plain, unvarnished, and indefensible.
We often talk about the “tone” of our public discourse, as though it were a matter of style. It is not. It is a matter of substance. A society that normalizes this kind of behavior is not merely becoming more polarized—it is becoming less humane.
There is still time to push back against that trend. But it requires something that seems increasingly rare: the willingness to say, without hesitation or qualification, that certain lines should not be crossed.
This is one of them.
And to those who crossed it: shame on you!
And that, my friends, is the latest elephant in the room.
